The copper top company sets sights on the cloud

How do you define the business you are in right now, and how should you define it to be market-driving?

To help you answer these critical questions, you can use the Accordion Chart. As detailed in my book, Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life, the Accordion Chart is an illustrative process that enables the flexible exploration of market spaces that an organization currently resides in and should look to occupy. It illuminates the full spectrum of an offering’s positioning from its core utility to its most general application. It is called an Accordion Chart because as the musical instrument, it is collapsible, so that it can be used to flexibly look across, combine and integrate various gradations of market detail.

Here’s a recent example of a kind of discovery Accordion Chart application results in. It illustrates how battery maker Duracell is shaping its future by finding connections with seemingly totally unrelated businesses: powering, protecting and serving up data.

Andy Vuong at the Denver Post reports that Duracell plans to entice customers by following the cell phone model: offering the physical drive for free in stores by having users commit to the paid service upfront.

Why would a battery company want to get into the crowded cloud storage market at all? Vuong spoke to Shep Gerrish, director of new-business development for Duracell, says its a way to expand on the company's well-known brand name.